How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery

What It Covers

Doug Bernauer (Radiant) and Drew Baglino (Heron) join a16z's Aaron Price Wright to examine why U.S. electricity delivery — not generation — is the core bottleneck, and how factory-built one-megawatt nuclear reactors and solid-state 5-megawatt transformers address power demand from data centers, defense, and reindustrialization.

Key Questions Answered

• •Grid bottleneck reframe: New power generation is not the constraint holding back U.S. energy growth — transmission and delivery infrastructure is. Decades of efficiency gains masked underinvestment in grid delivery systems, but with data centers, EV adoption, and industrial electrification converging simultaneously, delivery failures are now unavoidable and require hardware-level solutions at the distribution layer.
• •Microreactor economics threshold: Radiant's one-megawatt trailer-mounted nuclear reactor becomes cost-competitive against diesel generators at approximately $6.50 per gallon diesel pricing. Target markets include islands, remote military bases, and high-cost regions like Hawaii (80% diesel-powered) and Northern Europe, where national average diesel prices already exceed $7–9 per gallon, making the economics viable today.
• •Solid-state transformer scale: Heron's first product, Heron Link, converts 800–1,500V DC to 34kV AC in a modular 5-megawatt unit built from 365 individual 15kW modules. The fail-operational architecture keeps running if individual modules fail. A planned 40-gigawatt annual factory — equivalent to roughly 4% of total U.S. peak grid power — targets 60-second takt time for maximum capital efficiency.
• •DC microgrid convergence: Solar generation, battery storage, compute infrastructure, and Radiant's microreactors all natively operate on DC power. Combining these with solid-state power electronics enables self-contained DC microgrids deployable at military installations, hospitals, or disaster zones — bypassing the complexity of grid interconnection entirely and reducing permitting, civil construction, and installation timelines to roughly 48 hours.
• •Data center grid impact: Data centers are net-positive for electricity rates because they consume near maximum capacity continuously, unlike residential customers averaging roughly 10% utilization. Higher steady-state loads increase kilowatt-hour throughput across fixed delivery infrastructure, lowering per-unit costs for all ratepayers. The destabilization risk — gigawatt-scale facilities disconnecting instantly — is solvable through software-defined grid-forming controls and modest onsite energy storage.